All Articles

“Honor & Sacrifice: Remembering a Japanese-American Hero”

Tuesday, February 17
7 p.m.
Great Hall, Memorial Union

A panel discussion with filmmaker Lucy Ostrander will immediately follow the 28-minute film. She will be joined by Jane Dusselier, director of the Asian American Studies Program, and Neil Nakadate, Professor Emeritus of English; and Grace Amemiya, Ames resident and former internee.

Honor and Sacrifice tells the story of Roy Matsumoto, one of many Japanese Americans who enlisted in the U.S. military while detained in internment camps during World War II. Matsumoto became a decorated war hero. He was instrumental in saving his battalion, which was starving and surrounded by Japanese fighters deep in the Burmese jungle. He was eventually sent to postwar Japan, where he found members of his family still alive in Hiroshima despite the nuclear bomb attack that had devastated the city. Filmmakers Lucy Ostrander and Don Sellers use archival footage and family photographs to illustrate this immigrant family’s experience and the many internal conflicts and ironies Japanese-American enlistees experienced during and in the aftermath of the Second World War.